Abrasive wear components, such as tungsten carbide components, are used in a variety of applications where high hardness and toughness are often desired traits. These include drilling, where cemented abrasive inserts are used in numerous drill bits, and even ballistics, where cemented abrasive tips are used on armor-piercing ammunitions.
Typically, abrasive wear components are formed by combining grains of an abrasive material, such as tungsten carbide, with a binder material, such as cobalt, to form a composite material. This composite material is pressed into a desired shape and heated, sometimes under pressure, such that the binder material liquefies and cements the grains of abrasive material together. The cemented abrasive component is then allowed to cool and ground to shape. The component may also be subjected to a low-energy cascading, or tumbling, process to improve the surface finish of the component. Oftentimes, this involves tumbling the component along with other components in a mixture of liquid and abrasive material, or detergent. Some processes use attritor balls in place of, or in addition to, the abrasive material or detergent.
In contrast to this low-energy cascading, high-energy cascading has been used rarely in industrial applications, such as finishing cemented abrasive components. Instead, most high-energy cascading has been limited to polishing various objects, such as dental implants, and has only been used to improve the surface finish of an object, not to change its physical properties.